November 30, 1993

DR. FRANCIS S. COLLINS, the new director of the National Center for Human Genome Research, is a man of exuberant enthusiasm. His parents are "wonderful, fascinating," people. His scientific colleagues are "some of the most wonderful, smartest people in the world." The missionary doctors he worked with while doing charity work in Nigeria are "remarkable people," who have become his lifelong friends. And the Human Genome Project itself? Dr. Collins says this international effort to map and identify every one of the 100,000 human genes, to determine the exact sequence of the three billion nucleotides that form the building blocks of human DNA, is "the most important and the most significant project that humankind has ever mounted."

The deepening malaise in Japan's economy, and concern that the Government does not have a plan for breathing new life into it, pushed the world's second-largest stock market into a steep plunge on Monday, reflecting the rock-bottom level of confidence the Japanese seem to have in their own system. The market managed to rebound somewhat today, but analysts said the gain was only a pause in the prevailing downward move.

Despite repeated assertions of solidarity between France and Germany, the long conflict in world trade talks involving France, Germany and the United States has demonstrated stark differences of economic confidence and outlook between France and Germany, Europe's largest industrial powers. As negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade for a global trade accord gather momentum over the next two weeks, against a Dec. 15 deadline, it seems clear that Germany's differences with France will sharpen and lead to considerable pressure from Bonn on the French Government to accept an agreement.

At a campaign stop at Olin Ordnance, a weapons factory in St. Petersburg, Fla., Jeb Bush talked to the employees about how he would like to abolish the Florida Department of Education and impose tougher penalties on teen-agers caught with guns. Then the Republican candidate for governor asked if there were any questions.

Most of the Russian Army may be reeling from the collapse of the Soviet Union and the blow to its professional pride, but it is boom time for Russia's 201st Motorized Rifle Division, stationed abroad in nominally independent Tajikistan. The 201st, as a rear-echelon force in what was the Soviet Union's poorest republic, had been under strength for years by as much as 40 percent.